God, whom we see not, is; and God who is not, we see; Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle we take it is dee. The clever little work, from which the above is an extract, was published anonymously, but has been ascribed by the _Athenæum_, and other authorities, to a no less distinguished poet than Mr. A. C. Swinburne. Its full title is-- SPECIMENS OF MODERN POETS. THE HEPTALOGIA; OR, THE SEVEN AGAINST SENSE. A CAP WITH SEVEN BELLS. I. The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell. II. John Jones. III. The Poet and the Woodlouse. IV. The Person of the House (Idyl CCCLXVI.) V. Last Words of a Seventh-rate Poet. VI. Sonnet for a Picture. VII. Nephelidia. All these poems display wonderful power and choice of language, with a perfect mastery of the most difficult forms of metre, such as only a practised poet could achieve. * * * * * _The Nineteenth Century_ for May, 1880, contained another of the Laureate's vague rhapsodical poems, entitled _De Profundis_, of which all the meaning was as well expressed in the following parody as in the original:-- "Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep, From that great deep before our world begins; Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep, From that true world within the world we see, Whereof our world is but the bounding shore. Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep, With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy." _The Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant_, by Mr. W. S. Gilbert, which was produced at the Savoy Theatre, on January 5th, 1884, though a humorous adaptation of Tennyson's _Princess_, is not strictly a burlesque, and is styled by the author "A Respectful Operatic Per-version" of the Laureate's poem. It is altered from an earlier piece by Mr. Gilbert on the same theme. Almost the only passage which can be considered an actual parody of Tennyson's diction is the speech of the Princess Ida to the Neophytes, which is modelled on the Lady Psyche's harangue in the original poem:--